Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [84]
'Charming,' she says, real helpful, and refuses to take my hand again. I hadn't even realised we were holding hands. I'm fucking starving, maybe even dying, and she's concerned about playing Ms. Manners. Which sparks me off on my motherbitch, and how the least she could do is download some cash so we can buy breakfast and a Ghost for K, who is jonesing bad, and maybe a pair of cheapnasty sunglasses so I can deal with the glare. I mean, what are parents for?
But the catch is that we're still phoneless. It took fifteen minutes just to get out of my apartment block, waiting for someone else's SIM to trigger the door so we could slip out. Pretend making-out in the hall, so we had an excuse to be hanging about.
I accost a pedestrian on the sidewalk, a man in a red leather jacket unlocking his car, one of the only people around.
'Hey, excuse me, sir? My phone is down and I was wondering–'
'No. I'm sorry,' he says, super-brusque in the brush-off, already getting into the car, adding, 'God bless you,' through the window as he zips it up, like I was some filthy riff. Like a riff could afford to be traipsing round town in a BabyStrange coat, even if it is fritzing, blurting random images from its memory. It did not take kindly to that power-up at the station. Shit. At this rate we're going to be walking to Lerato's.
It's the same story at the underway. The automatic doors won't fucking open to let us get into the station, let alone onto the trains. I don't see how they're expecting us to report to our nearest handy vaccine centre if we can't fucking get there. And no one will let me cadge a call.
K keeps touching her mouth, distracted, like she's making sure it really is all there.
'Do you think you could stop playing with your face and give me a hand here?'
'What do you want me to do?' she says, as if it's my fault that we're stranded, isolated. Disconnected.
'You're a girl. You're cute. Get someone to let you use their phone.'
'What do you want me to tell them?'
'That you dropped it in the toilet. That you were mugged. I don't care. Anything. Wait, here's the number you wanna connect,' and as I'm writing it down for her, I realise I don't know the fucking number. It's on autodial, preprog nine, starts 083-253 something something something. I don't know Lerato's digits either, or even that skank Unathi's. Which doesn't leave us much in the way of options. My stomach is knotting audibly with hunger.
Someone tugs on my sleeve. 'Buy me a bunny chow?' It's a street kid, wearing filthy men's shoes that swallow his feet, tufts of newspaper sticking out in ruffles, clutching a brown paper bag like his life depends on it, and faintly reeling already at this time of the a.m.
'Aw, c'mon don't touch the fashion. Not now, okay? Just piss off.'
The kid is nonplussed. He plucks at my coat again, skittering out of reach when I move to grab him, laughing. 'You should check, my larnie. Your fashion is fried.'
'Do I know you? Fuck off!'
'Toby.' Kendra puts her hand on my arm, and I'm so fucking sick of people touching me.
'What?'
'Maybe he has a phone.'
But the best the mangy street kid has to offer is a browning banana, which he proffers like a serious act of benevolence. Kendra takes it in both hands, like you're supposed to do with Japanese business cards. 'Thanks,' she says, as genuinely grateful as if it was the same fucking species of usefulness as a phone. So much for the black-market, the underground economy.
I grab it out of her hand and hold it up to my ear, feeling how it's already turned soft and squidgy inside its skin. 'Hello? Hello? Mom? Yeah, send the fucking cavalry already. What's that, you say? I'm sorry, you're breaking up.' This cracks the kid up, especially when I crush the banana in my fist so that the skin splits and the insides squelch out. 'You could do with an upgrade,' I say, examining the sludge in my hand. 'This one's fritzed.' I hand it back to him,